50 Fun Facts About Norfolk

Which condiment has Colman's of Norwich milled since Jeremiah Colman set up at Stoke Holy Cross mill in 1814?

Mustard got its Colman's tang from blending brown and white seeds, milled at Stoke Holy Cross until 1862. Unilever has owned the brand since 1995.

Which comedian plays Alan Partridge, the Norwich radio host who lives in a roadside hotel pitching TV ideas?

Steve Coogan has played Partridge since the radio show On the Hour in 1991, and the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge earned two BAFTA awards.

Which birds did Bernard Matthews rear in the 35 rooms of Great Witchingham Hall, later selling them on TV as 'Bootiful'?

Turkeys hatched in the dining room while Matthews and his wife lived in two unheated rooms of the hall. His own 1980 advert put the Norfolk-accented 'Bootiful' into the national consciousness.

Which Dickens novel uses Great Yarmouth as a key setting, a town he called 'the finest place in the universe'?

David Copperfield was written partly at the Royal Hotel on Yarmouth's Marine Parade, where Dickens stayed while working on it.

Under 'Sandringham time', begun by the future Edward VII to lengthen shooting days, how were estate clocks set?

Half an hour ahead of GMT bought daylight for shoots that ran from October to February, and the custom lasted until 1936. Queen Victoria had the clocks reset on her visits, calling it 'a wicked lie'.

Norwich Castle's Norman keep served what purpose from 1220 until 1887, seven years before it became a museum?

A gaol, or prison, occupied the keep for more than 650 years before the Norwich Museum moved in during 1894. The keep and its old prison wings are Grade I listed.

Which north Norfolk village has Britain's only independently run lighthouse, East Anglia's oldest still working?

Happisburgh's light is kept by a local trust created by its own Act of Parliament in 1990.

Despite its name, Wells-next-the-Sea in north Norfolk now sits roughly how far from the North Sea after silting?

About a mile of marsh and a confined channel now separate the town from open water, after a mile-long bank built in 1859 reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh.

Which Norfolk resort, unusually for a town on England's east coast, has a seafront facing west across The Wash?

Hunstanton's beach cliffs are striped in orange carrstone, red chalk and white chalk, stacked one above the other.

Which BBC sitcom shot its exteriors in Thetford, whose buildings doubled for the seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea?

Dad's Army is remembered in the town by a museum housed in part of Thetford Guildhall.

Which political radical, active in both the American and French revolutions, was born in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737?

Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense argued for American independence and whose Rights of Man answered Edmund Burke, is commemorated by a statue in Thetford.

Norwich City's nickname honours the local history of breeding which bird, perched on a ball in the club badge?

Canary breeding in the area gave the club both its nickname and its traditional yellow-and-green kit.

In the 1993–94 UEFA Cup, Norwich City became the only English club to win at the Olympiastadion against which side?

Bayern Munich fell to Norwich in the club's only European campaign, which ended in the third round.

Which University of East Anglia building, designed by Norman Foster, appears in Avengers: Age of Ultron?

The Sainsbury Centre also hosted scenes for Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, all shot in the mid-2010s.

Which prison reformer, born into Norwich's Quaker Gurney family in 1780, was on the Bank of England £5 note until 2017?

Elizabeth Fry grew up at Earlham Hall, a house that now belongs to the University of East Anglia.

Which Swardeston-born nurse was executed in occupied Belgium in 1915 for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape?

Edith Cavell treated wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination, and her grave lies in the grounds of Norwich Cathedral.

Anna Sewell, born in Great Yarmouth in 1820, wrote which novel about a horse, the only book she ever published?

Black Beauty came from a writer who left Norfolk for London as a baby and died back at Old Catton, near Norwich, in 1878.

Which sports-car maker founded by Colin Chapman moved in 1966 to Hethel, a former airfield in Norfolk?

Lotus laid out its Hethel test track on sections of RAF Hethel's wartime runway.

Norwich Union, the insurer founded in 1797, merged with CGU in 2000 into a group renamed what in 2002?

Aviva was an invented palindrome adopted by shareholder vote in April 2002, replacing the clumsy merger name CGNU plc.

Which medieval anchoress wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving English work by a woman?

Julian of Norwich lived in permanent seclusion in a cell attached to St Julian's Church, and hers are the only surviving English works by an anchoress.

Which Wymondham farmer led the 1549 rebels who camped on Mousehold Heath and seized Norwich over land enclosures?

Robert Kett was about 57 and one of Wymondham's wealthier farmers, and an oak named after him still stands beside the B1172 near Hethersett.

What did 16th-century Norwich call the Dutch and Flemish Protestant refugees who became a third of its population?

The Strangers fled Catholic persecution, with the people of Ypres in particular choosing Norwich, and the city's Strangers' Hall keeps the name.

What was dug from Grime's Graves, the complex of Neolithic mine shafts in Norfolk's Breckland near Brandon?

Flint was worked there between about 2600 and 2300 BC, and production may have carried on through the Bronze and Iron Ages.

What stood at the centre of Seahenge, the Bronze Age timber circle on Holme beach that the press named in 1998?

An inverted oak stump sat inside a ring of timbers felled in 2049 BC, when the site was surrounded by salt marsh rather than sea.

Which Iron Age objects, over 150 in gold and other alloys, make up Norfolk's Snettisham Hoard, found from 1948?

Torcs, the Iron Age neck rings, survive in more than 150 fragments dated to about 70 BC, now shared between the British Museum and Norwich Castle.

King's Lynn keeps England's only surviving warehouses of which medieval alliance of northern trading ports?

The Hanseatic League's Hanse House of 1475 and Marriott's Warehouse are the league's only remaining buildings anywhere in England.

Which Canadian Pacific city and island take their name from a Royal Navy explorer born in King's Lynn in 1757?

Vancouver honours George Vancouver, who sailed from England in 1791 with HMS Discovery and HMS Chatham to explore the Pacific.

Which resort, signposted 'Gem of the Norfolk Coast', has a lifeboat station on its pier and a brown crab named after it?

Cromer's crab fishery is the main income of its fishermen, and the pier also carries the Pavilion Theatre.

Which archaeologist, who opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, spent much of his childhood in Swaffham, Norfolk?

Howard Carter was a distant cousin of Harry Carter, the Swaffham art teacher who carved many of Norfolk's village signs.

Which queen, mother of Edward III, lived at Castle Rising in Norfolk after her fall from power in 1330?

Isabella of France extended the castle buildings and kept a regal lifestyle there, entertaining her son on several occasions.

Blickling Hall, the Jacobean National Trust house in Norfolk, stands on an estate held 1499–1505 by which family?

The Boleyns held Blickling a generation before Anne Boleyn's rise at court; the present house of 1616 passed to the National Trust in 1940.

Which Norfolk house, commissioned in 1722 by Robert Walpole, is a key building in English Neo-Palladian architecture?

Houghton Hall is now the residence of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, and its builder is counted as Britain's de facto first prime minister.

Which Palladian house near Norfolk's north coast was home to Thomas Coke, the agrarian reformer 'Coke of Norfolk'?

Holkham Hall was built by an earlier Thomas Coke, the reformer's great-uncle, whose earldom ended when he died without surviving sons.

Thetford Forest, planted after the First World War as a timber reserve, is Britain's largest forest of which kind?

Lowland pine went into the Breckland sands because the war had consumed so many of the country's oaks and other slow-growing trees.

Which lake on the Norfolk waterways, slightly brackish from its nearness to the sea, has the largest surface area?

Hickling Broad's navigation channel is only 1.5 m deep, and the water forms part of the Broadland Ramsar wetland site.

Up to 500 of which animals gather at the tip of Blakeney Point, the shingle spit on Norfolk's north coast?

Seals of two kinds share the colony, and the harbour seal pups born between June and August can swim almost immediately.

The Peddars Way, a 46-mile path across Norfolk to the coast at Holme-next-the-Sea, follows the line of what?

A Roman road gave the route its line, though more than one writer argues it began as an older trackway the Romans merely adopted.

In Norfolk dialect, whom does 'bor' address, as in the Singing Postman's title 'Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Bor?'

A neighbour, or simply a friend, is 'bor', and the same vocabulary gives 'cor blarst me' for shock or surprise.

Which two-word motto belongs to the University of East Anglia, founded in Norwich in 1963 to designs by Denys Lasdun?

Do Different is the motto of a campus whose first plans Lasdun, a 'New Brutalist', unveiled at a press conference in April 1963.

Which 1998 Booker winner took the University of East Anglia's creative writing MA in 1971, its founding year?

Ian McEwan was followed on the course by Kazuo Ishiguro, MA 1980, who went on to win both the Booker and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Norwich Cathedral's flint-and-mortar Norman walls are faced with cream limestone shipped from which French city?

Caen stone faces a cathedral whose spire, at 315 ft, is England's second tallest after Salisbury's.

Which client king of Rome, Boudica's husband, willed his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman emperor?

Prasutagus ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome, and when his will was ignored and the kingdom annexed, Boudica's revolt followed.

Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk, famed for its carved west front, belonged to which order, a Benedictine reform?

Cluniac monks dedicated the priory to St Mary, St Peter and St Paul, and its ruins now belong to the Earl of Leicester.

Which wader with an upcurved bill, the RSPB's emblem, breeds on islands at its Titchwell Marsh reserve in Norfolk?

The avocet shares Titchwell with marsh harriers, bitterns and bearded reedlings nesting in the reeds.

Which Norfolk coxswain, the RNLI's most decorated lifeboatman, has a museum in the Rocket House beside a pier?

Henry Blogg's museum displays the lifeboat H F Bailey III as its centrepiece, near a pier that gained its own lifeboat station in the 1920s.

Norwich City's Carrow Road ground, opened in August 1935 after The Nest proved too small, was built in how many days?

82 days was enough to replace The Nest, which had been deemed inadequate for the crowds the club was drawing.

In which 2013 film does Alan Partridge turn negotiator after a sacked DJ, played by Colm Meaney, takes hostages?

Alpha Papa was shot in Norwich and Mitcham from January 2013 and premiered that July, with Armando Iannucci and Peter Baynham among its writers.

The heritage North Norfolk Railway from Sheringham to Holt via Weybourne takes its nickname from which flower?

Poppy Line trains start beyond Sheringham's National Rail platform, which was rebuilt in 2019 for the new Class 755 units.

The Norfolk wherry, a few of which survive restored on the Broads, was traditionally what kind of vessel?

A cargo boat with large sails, the wherry was developed in the 18th century to replace the earlier Norfolk Keel.

Which kind of road does Norfolk lack entirely, making it one of the few English counties without one?

A motorway has never reached Norfolk, and only two routes from the west give the county a direct link to the A1.